Month: December 2011

Just a few weeks ago during SC11 Microsoft released two new or updated HPC products, namely Windows Azure HPC Scheduler and Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 SP3. However, what I saw and heard during the last few months as well as during SC11 did not give me the best feeling for the future of Microsoft’s HPC Server product. This post is on my impressions and thoughts not only on the product, but also on doing HPC on the Windows platform in general.

What disturbed me a little was the absence of any roadmap presentation. Well, over the last few years Windows HPC Server clearly has become mature enough to not lack any significant feature necessary for deployment and use on a medium-sized HPC installation. However, Microsoft publically outlining a product roadmap with several key features always felt right, and it’s absence at SC11 has been noted by the community. Furthermore, they quietly killed their Dryad project (including LINQ to HPC), which was prominently displayed at SC10, now betting on a yet-to-be-released distribution of Apache Hadoop for Windows HPC Server and Azure. Finally, there have been several business restructuring activities inside Microsoft. For example, here in Germany Microsoft apparently shut down the HPC group and moved (some of) the people under the hood of Azure. From what I heard, all these activities caused some confusion in the community on how Microsoft sees the future of the Windows HPC Server product and how much support and innovations may be expected from the company on this regard.

What Microsoft now talks a lot about is the Azure integration. If you followed the development of Windows HPC Server up to release R2 SP3, you could clearly see this coming. From a technology point of view, I am impressed. However, I am not convinced yet, for several reasons – the most important one being the offer much too expensive for our application needs. Of course we are following what is going on regarding Clouds and HPC, and in fact in one project we are extending one application to make use of both on-premise and off-premis compute power based on availability (and maybe even price). But for the time being, our local clusters, including the one running Windows, will clearly dominate (or, as we Germans say, set the tone).

Finally, I am missing a clear picture of HPC-related improvements in the Windows Server roadmap. Just recently we added a frontend system with 160 (logical) cores, this is 8 sockets, 512 GB of memory. Windows just works on such a machine – but it could do better. It could serve HPC applications better. And given that next-gen ordinary (HPC) systems probably have a similar core count, Windows really has to serve applications better on such machines in order to stay competitive. Furthermore, smooth and stable integration of accelerators – be it GPGPUs, or something different but similar in spirit – will be as important at least.

Windows Task-Manager with 160 cores (8 sockets)

I will stop here. Our user base is clearly showing a demand for Windows HPC Server-based clusters, and in fact the demand is growing. Trying to combine my personal opinion with the feedback and opinions I got from the (German) community, Microsoft has to improve the communication regarding Windows HPC Server. It is time for a clear statement regarding the future of the product and the directions it will be going to.